“In terms of comedy being a survival skill, it’s more of a survival skill for men,” says Silverman, who manages to be both coquettish and guileless as she pokes a stick at taboos and stereotypes, as well as that very American malady called self-involvement. (Onstage she has said 9/11 was particularly devastating because it was the day she discovered that a soy chai latte was, “like, 900 calories.”) Not everyone gets the joke, but, she says, “if anyone complains, I just apologize.” Her voice takes on a kittenish tone: “I just want them to be hap-pee.”

Do you and your boyfriend, Jimmy Kimmel, have a lot of arguments about what’s funny?

Well, we don’t have arguments. In a lot of ways, we are so alike it’s hilarious. We go for the same joke. But we also have very different senses of humor. It’s funny, because he’ll pitch me something that I don’t see as funny at all, and I’ll see him do it on the show and it works. Or we have a fight over a joke of mine that I wrote. It’s purposely stupid, but he’s like, “That’s not funny at all!” It’s my first jokey joke: what phone company does a ghost have? It’s so stupid.

[Spooky voice:] Ver-iiiiiiiiii-zon. [Laughs.] It’s so dumb, but I love it. I love it because it’s dumb. He’s like, “That’s so stupid. Nobody’s going to laugh at that.” But now I say that before I do the joke, and then I do it, and I’m like, “See? Fuck you, Jimmy!” Because I know it is not funny.